Race, Riots, and the Police

welcome to the Manhattan Institute's event cast on race riots and the police thank you all for joining us for this important and timely conversation my name is Jason Riley I'm a senior fellow here at the Manhattan Institute and I want the viewers to know that throughout the program please enter your questions on any of the platforms that you're watching us on and we will either wrap them into the discussion or save them for the Q&A at the end of the event so I just want everyone to know that before we we get started so as I said this of course could not be a more important or more timely conversation that we're going to have today since the the death of George Floyd and police custody last month we've seen nationwide unrest we've seen protests not only here in America but internationally and we've also seen a certain narrative take hold it starts with the assumption that the only way to properly view George Floyd's death is through a racial lens in fact all encounters between police and black suspects are increasingly viewed this way it's a narrative that assumes the behavior of Derek show then it's typical police behavior toward black suspects and it assumes that George Floyd is a sort of black every man in America that what happened to him happens to black people all the time that blacks essentially leave the house each day worried about having a violent encounter with police the media has has run with this narrative which faces very little pushback very very little skepticism and it leaves us with the impression that the biggest problem facing black America today are in fact the police that law enforcement is at the root of social inequality in America and and so we find ourselves in the middle of a national conversation while police say there are calls to defund the police and abolish prisons there's legislation being discussed in Congress that would make it easier to prosecute cops and and fire them we have armed radicals that have taken over entire neighborhoods of a major city like Seattle that includes a police precinct that has been abandoned and these people have the mayor's blessing in doing so there are commentators who are not only making excuses for the rioting and the looting but indeed sharing it on to a large extent so what's going on here and that's the point of this event today we've invited some panelists to talk about that particularly interested in what they have to say because they fall within the demographic group and whose name all of this is happening that is they are young men of color they're supposed to be the biggest beneficiaries of what's being advocated in the wake of George Floyd's death so let's get to our panelists I'll briefly introduce them and then we can get started with questions first up we have Jamil jivani who's a lawyer and author and who heads a nonprofit organization aimed at helping young people called Road home research and analysis he's a graduate of Yale Law School and the author of the book why young men the dangerous allure of violent movements and what we can do about it and I hope we get a chance to talk about that book our next panelist is Ralph mango who is a deputy director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute and is written widely on urban crime and policing and the criminal justice system in general and finally we have Coleman Hughes who's just recently joined the Manhattan Institute and there's a graduate of Columbia University Coleman has testified for Congress about slavery reparations and he's written widely about race for any number of publications including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal well that so let's get started with the questions gentlemen and I thought I would start with you Ralph and with a very basic question that I think a lot of people have assumed but wanted to get your take on this and that is do we know that the Floyd encounter with police was racially motivated that it happened because Floyd is black can we make an assumption and if not why have so many people jump to that conclusion yes so I mean it sounds like a simple question but I think the answer is pretty complicated the answer the short answer is no I don't think that we can make that assumption because as far as I've seen there there's just no evidence that that officer showed in harbored racial animus that motivated his actions that day which were reprehensible irrespective of what his views on race are but I think the reason that so many people have assumed that this was racially motivated is because it's the event fits into a pre-existing rhetorical structure right that rhetorical structure is built upon the assumption that that that that policing is a system that was built to perpetuate white male poverty and so when you have a terrible instance of misconduct like like the case of George Floyd when the officer is white and the victim is black the question of motivation is assumed it's considered to be a foregone conclusion and you know as to what some of the reasons for that are I can only speculate I think one might be the the power that we've seen you know that these narratives can have to drive change and to obscure facts that get in the way of the change that a lot of people have been capitalizing on these events to affect like to ask you the same question Coleman why have so many people assume this was a racial incident and do you agree with Ralph that it might have something to do with fitting a narrative that maybe some activists some political types some more progressive commentators want to push yeah absolutely I agree with Ralph that the the short answer is we don't know if it was racially motivated I that that that sounds crazy to people who haven't been paying attention to the full range of people who get killed by police in this way but it's worth reminding people there was a white man named Tony tempo who died in a very similar way under the knee of a Dallas police officer for 13 minutes in 2016 and I was released on video and you know didn't spark as much outrage as the George Floyd incident which you know which leads to your question which is why is it that people view this as something that only happens to black people and the answer lies in the massive coverage bias in the national media you know dozens of white people you know at least a dozen sometimes several dozen unarmed white people get killed by the cops every year and those stories just die in the black hole of local news they never escape and make it to national news so people who are just following the news casually understandably get the false impression that this kind of thing overwhelmingly or only happens to black people and you know in many ways it's not their fault because it's what the national national you know media has has fed them and then the question becomes why is there that coverage bias in the national in the national media why have we heard about George Floyd but you know almost no one knows the name Tony timba and the answer to that I think it has something to do with a an understandable sense you know you know Americans I can certainly speak for myself but I think many Americans were raised you know watching Andry watching the videos of white police officers brutally hosing and sticking the dogs on you know civil rights protesters and the sixties peaceful protesters and that kind of mold is imprinted in many ways on the on the country's moral imagination and almost ingrained in our sub-conscience so when we see a white officer doing something to a black man it actually hits the American mind much differently and much more poignant ly than if we saw a white officer doing the same thing to a white suspect or a black officer doing it to a white suspect or a black suspect Jameel do you agree with Coleman that the media plays a role here and and and and helping people jump to these conclusions regardless of whether all the facts have been laid out that just you know white white cop black suspect must be something fishy going on here what role does the press play and prepare sort of leading people to jump to conclusions yeah I mean I do think that the media does play a role certainly they the media helps direct our attention to some cases and not others but part of why the media has the control on that narrative is that is speaking to a reality and that reality is is disproportionality and the way disproportionality works in our society I think when people see George Floyd for example being killed by a police officer it is objectively more likely that it would happen to George Floyd because he's black then it would happen to a white person and that alone is that sort that disproportionality is a source I think of genuine frustration and concern I think a lot of black people across America know that they're if they are more likely to be stopped by the police they're more likely to interact with the police they're more likely to have a negative encounter with the police than a white person now why that is the case I think deserves a much more nuanced conversation than the media currently makes space for but I do think we need to acknowledge that that is a reality that black people are disproportionately experiencing law enforcement in this sort of way and I think the media wants to point us to certain explanations over others for why that may be the case well let's have that more nuanced conversation I mean that's part of why we want to have this panel so - why are black encounters with police the rate of those accountants why is it so much higher than what other groups are the police picking on blacks where they are they over policing these communities do they have a 10-4 blast what what explains this this brit a disproportionate number of accounts between black communities and police officers well a big part of that I think is the way violent crime is dispersed in a city and in a given geographic area if you live in a majority-black neighborhood you're more likely to be exposed to gang violence gun comment you're more likely to have to worry whether your kids are going to make it home safe after going to school or going to visit a friend's house and so you you're calling the cops and you're relying on the cops to provide some sort of stabilizing presence for community safety and because of that black people are going to interact with the cops in a disproportionately higher rate is prejudice and bias factor I'm sure it is just like prejudice and bias is a factor in every other part of life it's part of how human beings think and experience the world but I do think that the way violent crime is distributed in American cities is a big part of why police are having more common interactions with black individuals and others okay okay well jimmy'll says that you know racism still exists it could be playing a role here and the way communities are policed Congress is right now considering some reforms including making it easier to fire cops or prosecute cops police aren't perfect central database for police that have been disciplined so they can't move to another state join the force and hide their background and so forth um just curious what you make of these reforms in general on principle whether you think they're good but more importantly how much of a difference do you think these reforms will make when it comes to getting at the problem Jamil is talking about yeah I mean look I think that's really kind of the right question and before you answer it I think we have to get a realistic picture of just how big of a problem police violence is right one of the problems as I see it within this this broader debate is that there's there's been this kind of toxic narrative that's caught fire particularly in the black community which says that policing as an institution can be fairly characterized by unjustifiable uses of force the majority of which are purposefully reserved for black and brown people this is false right police use of force is extremely rare and that's true whether we're talking about lethal force or non-lethal force right the lethal force is used in about 0.003 percent of all arrests and that's coming from from estimate from 2018 where police make ten point three million arrests and fired their weapons an estimated three thousand forty three times when it comes to non-lethal force it's generally used in less than 1% of all arrests right this does not evidence a large-scale problem and that's sort of the first practical limit that a lot of these popular reform proposals are going to face in terms of the difference that they could make which is to say that because the problem with police violence is so overblown there just really isn't all that much room for improvement right and police have made incredible progress on this front over the last several decades and you know this is this is just one of the the sort of political problems is that they've gotten absolutely no credit for that progress right in 1971 the NYPD fired their weapons more than eight hundred times they wounded more than 220 people and killed almost a hundred by 2016 those numbers were down to 72 twenty-something and 9 respectively none of that progress is reflected in the sort of rhetorical posture of this debate and so I think that's one practical limit that any proposal that any policy proposal is going to face is the extent to which it's going to be able to overcome this overwhelmingly powerful narrative but the second is that you know there's just not a lot of data behind a lot of the popular reform proposals that we're seeing I do agree that it has been made too difficult to fire some bad police officers when they when they misbehave in a lot of departments and I think that reflects some very real concerns about about job security and and there are ways around that that we should be that we should be talking about and it's the support for that is really just a general incapacitation argument right the same way that it benefits society to incapacitate a criminal by imprisoning them it benefits society to incapacitate a bad cop by taking that power away from them but but we have to do that reserve as ly and soberly and you know unfortunately our conversation right now just doesn't allow us to get to that point and so I'm just I don't have a ton of hope for the potential that these popular reform proposals have to make things better what do you think about that Coleman some of these proposals are calling for collecting more data better data sharing more data for instance different police departments collect crime in different ways or collective I should say data in different ways there's no central database where they feed the information into in terms of the behavior their officers how often they fire their weapons and so forth there's no uniform way of reporting this nationwide some of this legislation would move us in that direction I know you're a data guy I like data too we all like to use it but I'm wondering if if that's the real problem here when it comes to the narrative being pushed and if they had better data you know we wouldn't see the narrative that we see pushed out there I'm just I'd like to see more data - do you think it would make much of a difference in terms of changing the conversation we're having nationally yeah so I'm I'm pretty aligned with Ralph here and so so there are two things to say one is which reforms make sense I think you know transparent data makes a lot of sense to me Universal body cams makes it makes a lot of sense to me you know perhaps changing qualified immunity although I can sort of see both sides of that one you know demilitarized weapons makes a lot of sense to me but then there's this other question of how much will that address the problem of deadly shootings of unarmed Americans and Here I am rather pessimistic because I think we are we're misunderstanding why these shootings happen to begin with at first there's Ralph's point that the numbers are very low to begin with and it's hard it's harder to bring them lower from a low point than to bring them low from a high point but you know many of these shootings happen because America is the foremost gun country on planet Earth which means when a cop pulls over a suspect for example that that cop has a legitimate fear that the suspect has a glove has a pistol hidden in the glove compartment and that means in America unlike in say Britain when someone reaches for their wallet or for their smartphone a cop is is going to have a fear that can't be legislated away that the suspect is about to pull a gun on him or her and you know it's it has to be said that you know roughly 300 cops died every year and that has an effect on how American cops approach an American suspect so you know I can do all these reforms and I think we ought to have a very very serious and rational conversation about how we can make Police Department's accountable because that the status quo I think is unacceptable which is that short of excluding someone in the back it's very difficult to get punished as a police officer in this country that seems like it has to change to me however at the same time we also have to manage our expectations about what is possible I think we probably can I certainly hope we can get to a place where we never see something like George Floyd or Tony timki again but I bet you know all the money I have that no matter what we do we cannot get to a situation where there are zero or even you know very close to zero deadly shootings of unarmed Americans because of the reality of you know being a gun country okay so so Jamil what I what I think I'm hearing here and I certainly agree with it what I'm hearing is correct is no one thinks cops are perfect we should find ways to get rid of bad cops root them out of out of out of police forces that's all for the good but at the end of the day policing doesn't seem to be the central problem here you said before that police are in these communities because that's where the 911 calls originate they have legitimate reasons to be there which gets me to this question is making policing the centerpiece of this national conversation we're having right now the right way to go and if police aren't the central problem or policing isn't the central problem where would you like to see the focus of this conversation I mean a lot of people are paying attention right now if you think we're over emphasizing the role of police in black homicides in this country in my every data measure we have we are in fact doing that you know more than 7,000 black homicides last year two or three percent involving police were should the focus of this conversation be well I mean I would say if the goal is to get our societies and our cities in particular to a place where they could reasonably start you know reinvesting money away from law enforcement and into proactive things like mental health and social services and childcare and all these other things it's it's it's a necessity that violent crime is reduced and so it's it's a it's a kind of a vicious cycle in that respect where the problems that require us to invest more in policing then take money away from things that might address the core issues that require the police to come into the neighborhoods in the first place every police officer and police I've spoken too readily acknowledges that these are problems we're not going to simply arrest our way out of you know the lesson I think of the last 25 years is that law enforcement can can have a heavy hand on crime but that will also have devastating effects on families and communities at the same time so there is a role for the communities themselves to play and I think a lot of black Americans and that that I've worked with understand that there's a tension there between addressing the need to address violence in our neighborhoods and also create conditions for the police to interact with our young men less often where I don't think that tension is is appreciated is among people who shape the narratives and don't live in neighborhoods where we have that very real tension on the ground if you don't have to worry when you see on the news that a shooting has happened and you're not thinking well what intersection did that take place because maybe my mother or my cousin lives there then you probably aren't don't have the the real value of police on your mind on a regular basis so so there's a there's a broader class dimension I think to this where if you are privileged enough to not need the police it's easy to vilify them but if you live in a situation where you need the police and you see their immediate value I think you necessarily have a more complicated world of you and black lives matter as a community group that has emerged to provide a voice on this issue I think reflects where there is a class difference here black lives matter is very out of step I would say on many issues at least his leadership is with the opinions of the average black voter in America I mean if black lives matter was an authentic voice for the majority of black people I don't think Joe Biden would have won the Democratic primary for example I don't think you'd see in polls and surveys that people do want to talk about things like family there there are more positive views on law enforcement among the average black voter than then black lives matter leave you seduced to believe there's a lot of I would say rather conservative or center-right use on economics and need to create jobs and opportunities in education reform for black families so I think that on the ground we already see it as a more complicated conversation the police are not the center point it's in the I would call it an upper class or let's say what you know Michael in the author of the new class war would call a managerial class narrative that I think puts police as the center of the problem let me ask you a quick follow-up Jamil because I know you've written about role models and guidance in these communities particularly for young black men the hip-hop culture and that's influenced rap music and so forth or or young black men in these communities being taught to view the police with suspicion is this a cultural problem well I think absolutely that you know there's a glorification of criminality in a lot of pop culture a lot of that pop culture is a big business that makes money for the art and expression of young black men and it's very incentivized I think for a lot of black men to embrace criminality at least on a cultural perspective if not in your actual actions and behaviors so absolutely I think it is a problem and I wish that we held people who who see their cultural role to address systemic racism to the same standard when it comes to addressing criminality in in some of these neighborhoods because it's a it's heartbreaking that people get to make billions of dollars a year selling gangster fantasies and it's young black men who pay the price for that okay Oh Ralph I wanted to ask you if there's a danger here in the over focus on policing in other words is it not only why to the mark if the goal is to reduce the number of black black deaths each year is that dangerous to do this could there be a backlash among law enforcement and how might that that look how might that play out I know you've ridden with cops you you've written a lot about policing in urban areas what is the danger here of scapegoating law enforcement yeah I mean I think the danger is twofold the first part is that it feeds an unrealistic impression that's just unboard from the data that that these sort of things that we saw in the video with george floyd are regular occurrences as opposed to aberrations right that that creating and feeding that impression in my opinion is indefensible yet the danger is that people actually believe it right there was a 2016 morning console poll and it found that twice as many black respondents reported worrying more about those they know becoming victims of police brutality than of gun violence twice as many and considered also that a study published in the American Sociological review in 2016 showed that that high-profile cases of police violence lead to black residents being less likely to report crimes and so the first danger it really is that it creates this wall between black and brown communities which you know as we we saw just by talking about the violence numbers and the disparities there can be extremely dangerous when people are less likely to cooperate with police less likely to call them into their neighborhoods to deal with these very real problems but then as you intimated that there's also the reality that that police might pull back which is something that we've seen happen in recent years and you know a lot of people will say well oh well that's just you know police being babies and you know that that that would be the right response if the reason for the pullback was this kind of angry you know well go ahead and take care of it yourself kind of approach but actually I think much of the pullback is just real fear right I've spoken to a few police officers in the last week in departments around the country actually and they've all expressed a just a real sense that of insecurity I don't know what's going to happen if I if I approach this guy and maybe I should just lower my risk profile here and over the long run one of the dangers that this is going to have is that a lot of these sort of performs and a lot of this sort of rhetorical posture that demonizes police is going to lead to that job becoming more physically risky and more legally risky and as you increase the risk profile of a certain career of a certain profession right one of the ways that people calculate whether a risk is worth taking is by by considering there are other alternative options and the more risky an endeavor becomes the more the less attractive it becomes the people who have better alternative options and so what we're going to end up potentially doing is making policing attractive to a group of people that don't have very many options which means that the the recruiting pool is going to constitute people with lower IQs less educational attainment less stable psychological profiles and ultimately and perhaps ironically that might end up actually exacerbating the police violence problem that that we've worked so hard to get down to zero and so you know yeah these are real real dangers you know they also inform in my opinion radical and and and just dangerous reform proposals that that pursued ECAR serration at any cost that pursued deep policing at any cost and those have consequences too right there was there's a woman killed in the summer of 2018 in Chicago her name is Brittany Hills 24 years old standing on the street in front of her house holding her one-year-old daughter a car pulled up this little girl waved to this car and you know the guy in the passenger seat opens fire and hits Brittany Hill in the torso just below where she was carrying her daughter and she fell and collapsed and died in the street shielding her daughter from gun violence and that little girl's gonna grow up without a mother now and the reason that plays into this discussion is because the the person charged with her murder Michael Washington had nine prior felony convictions including one for second-degree murder you know God knows how many dozens of arrests he was on parole at the time and you know people ask themselves well how can somebody like that be on the street it's precisely because this pursuit of criminal justice reform at any cost this pursuit of D car serrations any cost put him there and and it cost a young woman her life and no one deserves to die like that and you know it just it breaks my heart because you know precisely because of what you pointed out which is that there are real dangers here that no one really wants to consider Coleman and Jimmy all talked about the the prominence of groups like black lives matter being able to drive the narrative here and also the different perspectives if you live in one of these communities and your relationship with police versus if you live outside of these communities and are are speaking from that perspective he also talked about culture though why why can't we like it why isn't culture black behavior black attitudes black habits towards police towards law enforcement why isn't that allowed to be part of the conversation why can't we talk about black homicides that don't involve police like the ones ralph was just describing which of course are the overwhelming majority of them what lies it so difficult to to have an honest discussion about the role that black culture is playing here when it comes with to incarceration rates crime rates and so forth even though that seems to be the biggest elephant in the room yeah so I think many people just get extremely uncomfortable and you can just you can feel the temperature of your own body almost rising as you utter the phrase black culture but you know if you lower the temperature and think about it and think about what is important to you know to discuss you know every group has a particular history in a particular culture that is shaped by that history and if cultures were all the same you know we wouldn't have any need for a word like multicultural and so you know the difference between how men Americans seem to view black people and white people is that why people are this group of people that they can behave good or behave bad if they behave bad they deserve to be called out and shamed and implored upon to change their behavior they are agents in the sense that they can make decisions and be held responsible for those decisions that's why we condemn white cops for being bad or you know why we condemn the you know Amy Cooper in Central Park for you know calling the police on a man she ought not have called the police on and using race in that way when a white person does something bad the instinct which is not wrong it's the correct instinct is to hold them responsible as a human capable of making decisions but when a black person does something bad there's a very different attitude people take and they think they're being enlightened they think this is a sign of their moral superiority that they that they don't blame a black person for doing something bad but it's actually the opposite the only people you don't blame for doing something bad are like children babies and dogs because you understand that you know if they do something bad they can't be appealed to to change their behavior so by by excusing any kind of misbehavior by black people people think they're doing the morally enlightened thing but it's actually the essence of dehumanizing well I mean let me follow up there with the cultural question because I think common you know when we talk about black cultural attitudes with respect to crime and so forth we're really talking about as a subculture certain segments of the black community particularly lower-income blacks who live in poor communities ghettos and slums and so forth and the culture that comes out of that that environment but which gets me to my my follow-up and and that the George Floyd presented as the every everyday black man typical black person um why do the sort of worst performers among blacks get to represent all black people most black people are not criminals let alone career criminals most black people are not drug addicts most black people are not poor in this country yet it's it's the sort of outlaw the black outlaw the criminal the drug dealer and so forth that gets to represent blackness in America and I find that very troubling but I don't see it it ending anytime soon it seems to be something and you spoke about some people feeling sort of good about themselves that let this is a way of caring about the black community when in fact these individuals don't really represent the black community yeah well I think there's a I think because of the history of white supremacy going back to slavery one of the features of black American culture is a deep sense of identity via victimhood and you know ultimately that that can be blamed largely just on how how entrenched racism has been throughout American history you know that when you when you beat a people down for hundreds of years it's it's fairly natural for them to have a sense of identity rooted in victimhood to some extent but it's a deeply unhealthy reaction because you know then your your entire sense of meaning becomes bound up in your being a victim of the system you know in almost it gives you a mental incentive to you know do worse in life because success is somehow a sign that you've lost you know your identity so I think that is what's behind the tendency to you know it's not that it's not so much that George Floyd is being said to represent black America because he's from a particular subculture that would lead someone to maybe counterfeit bills it's more that he's said to represent black culture because he was a victim of horrible police brutality and that victim image is very deep-seated in the black American consciousness Jameel when you hear words like systemic racism and white supremacy brought up in this discussion of George Floyd or these other encounters with police I mean what comes to mind to you what what do you think systemic racism means white supremacy means and this is it should that be part of this conversation or a central part of this conversation the way some progressives want to make it's very prominent writers you know Michelle Alexander's and and tonic EC coaches and black lives matter types this all is part of their narrative that we live black people live in a fundamentally racist a fundamentally oppressive society and and and that is the reason we are seeing these outcomes that's the reason we see these encounters with police and that's the reason we see these outcomes and until we address that we're gonna keep saying it yeah before I get to the systemic racism just to respond to southern Coleman said I think he's absolutely right to outline some of the pitfalls of associating black identity with people who are just a struggling or maybe dealing with some of the biggest challenges in our society however there is something I think very beautiful about that too which is that it's it's a Christian ethic right it's the idea that you know what christ taught that you know what you did for me is what you did for the least among us the idea that there are successful black people who do well in our society and then see someone like George Floyd and say that could be me that is a level of empathy that I think America at large would benefit a great deal from the question is just what we do with that empathy I think but the empathy is important and I wish there were the expectation on you know wealthy white people to see a white person in Appalachia struggling from opioids and thought and thinking that could be my my son or my nephew or my my daughter so I think that kind of empathy can be very beautiful and I believe that it's important to the question of systemic racism though I me I think systemic racism is often a vague word that actually takes a little little spot places little responsibility on to anyone so if you say there's systemic racism there's no actual racist that we get to point a finger at and say this person is being racist this person must change or be removed from his or her position or whatever the case it allows us to have a faceless kind of racism that makes it hard then to solve problems what I think is a valuable way of thinking about systemic racism is when we can identify actual policies that actively disadvantaged people because of where they come from or what they look like and thankfully we live in a society where there's far fewer examples of that than there used to be but one example that I can think of that I know the Manhattan Institute has taken a very serious look at is education policy I mean when you don't give parents a choice in where they can send their kids to go to school and you know that if you forced people to send their children to their local school that was shaped by a history of segregation and inequality and then you are then desk you know making that child destined to be in an unequal system that sounds like systemic racism to me and the way that you find it is you give people more choice and more freedom and not restrict them and I think that is an outlook on how we deal with systemic racism that I would encourage people to adopt um well there are couple questions coming in about the popularity of defunding the police or moving resources away from police closing prisons and so forth they'll reform how popular are these reforms in in these low-income black communities or is this something that progressives assume will will will go over well in these communities or that activists have pushed in the name of blacks without rank-and-file blacks really being on board yeah I mean I well I'll say I think there's certainly more popular now than they were you know even a month ago largely because of what's what's going on and the sort of peer pressure that that puts on people to sort of get on board the train that has all the momentum at this moment in time which is which is the reform train but I do think you're right to suggest that there is at least a divide within black and brown communities around the country where it is assumed that there is just kind of equal subscription to the idea that these reform proposals as radical as they may be are good you know and to the people who buy into that I would I would just offer a warning which is that we actually have a lot of evidence as to how things will look if we defund police if we divert them away from the mission of Crime Control we have some evidence of how things will look if we start to drastically lower incarceration for its own sake right again I should point you to the Brittany Hill case and the fact that in the city of Chicago the people who are suspected of shootings or homicides have an average number of 12 prior arrests that's that's a lot of criminal justice involvement under our current policy to make our criminal justice system even less punitive is going to have the effect of putting more Michael Washington's on the street and there's just no really there's just no way around that when it comes to policing I would just ask people do you think it's a coincidence that the city of Chicago saw its most violent weekend of the year on the weekend of May 31st while police were busy quelling riots in other parts of the city do you think it's a coincidence that May 31st was the single most violent day in Chicago's history since 1961 when it started keeping track that is a very clear snapshot of what we can expect if we divert police away from the communities that need the most and you know the idea that there is empowerment in in in these things ignores the very real downside risks that these policies carry and those downside risks are not going to be equally borne by people across the United States and so when Jamil says you know that he's frustrated by the fact that you know a lot of these activists don't even live in the communities on whose behalf they're purporting to speak I I sympathize with that because you know homicide is is extremely concentrated in the United States just 2% of counties account for more than 50% of all murders and even if you take a city like Chicago the south and west side has a drastically different public safety picture than the north side of that city does and you know to say that we oughta just you know from the top down put place these risks on the most vulnerable populations within our country I think it's just irresponsible Coleman well first I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the use of these phrases like systemic racism and white supremacy that just get thrown around thrown around in these conversations on the left and I wonder if they mean different things to different people or if they have no no real meaning at all so if you have any thoughts on that I like to hear them and then I'd like you to talk a little bit about how Lloyd's death is being used to push issues well be on police reform in this country I mean we are now talking about movies that should be bad books that should be banned Aunt Jemima and an Uncle Ben had been dragged into this discussion where where do you think this is headed so to your first question systemic racism the the term comes from a book written in 1967 by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton called black power which was the manifesto of the movement it was then called institutional racism and if you read that book what they really meant by the term was a real estate agent steering a black you know a black prospective homeowner into a black neighborhood rather than a more upscale neighborhood a racially biased banker that didn't give out a loan to a black business owner what they meant was a subtle kind of racism that is less violent than the KKK burning across on your lawn so in the original you know framing of institutional racism I completely agree that that exists and still exists today much less than than it was then but unfortunately what what institutional racism has come to me and to people who use it today is really basically any departure from perfectly equal outcomes you know if black people are 14% of the population but you know one-third of people in state and federal prison that's sufficient proof for many people that we live in a systemic ly racist society and you know I I don't I probably shouldn't have to say this obviously to the people here but that's an extremely superficial analysis of the problem you haven't looked at disparate crime rates you haven't looked you know you had you're operating on the assumption that everything should be equal when that hasn't happened anywhere on earth for any group of people rather than simply trying to make things better for the people at the bottom of society regardless of their race which ought to be the focus in my opinion and to your second question I you know I'm always curious what does you know if you're trying to get the Aunt Jemima logo changed or trying to get your local statue torn down listen you know I don't particularly care about any of these things I'm not gonna you know waste too much energy trying to preserve them if if people want to change them that's just the way of the world but you should stop and ask yourself what are you doing how is this helping the issue of police brutality or how's this helping to reduce racism actually ask those questions as if for the first time and you know in general the answer is absolutely nothing what they're just doing is giving us a kind of a sense of having accomplished accomplished something while all of the very real questions all of the very real problems that people on the left and the right want to address Albia in different ways remain Jameel if you could pick up on that a little bit we're talking about taking down statues banning books and movies and so forth you know I I know a fair number of progressives they're smart people they know that you know taking down a statue of Jefferson Davis isn't going to close the learning gap in schools or you know or boost boost homeownership or black incomes and/or reduce black crime rates it may be a worthy cause but you're not getting much bang for your buck if the goal is is reducing social inequality so why the focus wives expend so much energy on these relatively marginal things and in the grander scheme of things yeah it reminds me of when I was a student at Yale and you know New Haven Connecticut or Yale is has one of the greatest wealth disparities of any part of America and you know my classmates Anil would get very excited about wanting to change things like the name of one of the colleges in the university because it's associated with someone who was a bad person in history but they wouldn't get nearly as excited about I don't know maybe making schools better in New Haven so that the black kids who grow up in New Haven have a chance to go to Yale one day and not that difference in perspective always puzzled me I think part of it is people wanting to feel like they're powerful and it feels to them more achievable to change things like the name of a college or the logo of a pancake syrup or you know that whether statue is up or down I think being reminded of your power as an activist is sometimes a very appealing thing and so maybe it's the achievability of some of those goals that is part of the appeal I also think part of the appeal goes back to the Cole class thing that I brought up earlier which i think is a really really important issue and I believe a lot of people on you know on the right of American politics are starting to wake up to the realities of class in American society which is that you know someone that Yale just doesn't have the same interests as someone growing up in New Haven going to a not-so-great school even if they look the same and I know that's hard for people who think that race is such a controlling variable for what our political agendas should look like but the truth is that that's just not the case and it's unfortunate that if some people don't want to recognize that but I think the example you're giving about these symbolic gestures toward inequality where in a finite amount of time and energy we probably should be focused on bigger fish to fry I think that's a sign of this class being a bigger variable and what people choose to spend their time on okay um we don't have a lot of time left and I wanted to pose a question and get an answer from from each of you if possible and and it has to do with how tolerant do you think that the country at large will be at this agenda being pushed by I would say a relatively small minority of Americans progressive leftist activist and so forth and right now it's being indulged I think largely but I wonder how long white America in particular which is still obviously a very large majority of this country is gonna put up with it how long are they going to let you know Nicole Hannah Jones rewrite American history by telling us it's founded on slavery how long are they going to let people tell them which movies they can watch which books they can read which words they can use how you know is there going to be a coming is there a backlash that's going to come at some point I from white America in particular and I just like to get each your thoughts on that maybe you could start out rough yeah I think if I were answering that question just based on recent history you know specifically like post 1968 where I think there was a lot of evidence that the riots there sort of gave rise to Richard Nixon and a lot of kind of the law-and-order politics that that animated our approach to crime policing and incarceration from the 70s to the 90s I would say that the answer to your question is yes I think we can expect a backlash however I think the dynamics on the ground are just very different today I think there is exponentially more pressure being brought to bear on white America in particular that I'm not so sure there's going to be a willingness to to fight back very well at least very loudly so I'm not I'm not convinced that there will be a backlash this time around what I what I do think will happen is that people will start to very quietly kind of retract from interactions that that are more fraught retract away from cities and and you know that and that can be really devastating that in the kind of disinvestment that will follow that I think can really hurt black and brown communities in particular and and I think can can make for future conversations in our country that that require us to kind of be on the same page more difficult to have and ultimately I think it just kind of really tears at the fabric of our nation which is which is built on on integration and intermingling at and at a really necessarily high level and and I worry about what that portends how about you Jamil coming backlash or will we just see statues of Thomas Jefferson coming down well I I don't know I don't think we'll have a violent backlash or anything like that but I do think that when you see more and more groupthink which is occurring on these issues at an increasing rate especially at the institutional and managerial level of our society I do believe that there's going to be a demand for alternative ways of thinking about these things and we're starting to see that happen you know Tucker Carlson's ratings have been going through the roof during all this because people want to hear from somebody who's going to say something different and I think that is where I think the backlash will come from is people saying I don't want to hear this groupthink anymore who has something different to offer me and let's just hope that the people are offering an alternative offer a positive one well that's interesting Coleman he mentioned stuff across and has been a news lately his ratings are up but he's having trouble keeping advertisers which which tells you Corporate America might be a little skittish here even if there's there's a large majority of other Americans who want a straight shooter yeah absolutely I mean and it's not just Tucker Carlson it's it's literally anyone who's saying a word that is anywhere from mildly skeptical of the black lives matter narrative to totally dismissive of it is having a you know an upswell in you know attention being paid to them and it's it's all happening you know relatively silently you know this is the kind of thing this is the kind of dynamic that led the left to be apt and me included to be absolutely blindsided in 2016 by by Trump's election it's just you know lots of people silently on their own time thinking did George Floyd really die because he was black I wonder because there's that little kernel of skeptics curiosity that can never be extinguished and in a free country it will find some way of expressing itself so I think the backlash has already happened but it's a silent backlash okay well I'm gonna wrap things up here I want to thank you all for your time it's been a very very constructive conversation I think we covered a lot of ground and heard a lot of different perspectives that I don't think you hear in a lot of other places when it comes to discussing what's been going on in the country in recent weeks so so thank you again I want to thank our viewers for tuning in I also want people to please consider subscribing to the Manhattan Institute newsletters or making a contribution to our mission we have posted both links for doing so write in the comments window on your screen and thank you again for your time everyone be safe you

Channel: Manhattan Institute

Views: 117,744

Keywords: George Floyd, defund police, police, criminal justice, riots

Id: D2vctUezliE

Length: 58min 56sec (3536 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020